Restore deleted records

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Dear abarich,

I’m afraid there is no way to soften the blow. You are screwed! Our thoughts go out to you in this time of grief, misery and sorrow.

If you ran a query that deleted supposedly unneeded records, you in effect deleted them from the table. There is no recovery that I’m aware of. This is not like sending a document to the Recycle Bin where it waits patiently to be recovered. Compacting and repairing doesn’t, to my knowledge, play any part in this process. You’re not dealing with a corrupted database. You made a decision, albeit erroneous, to remove records from your table, and there is no recovery.

Having done this more than once myself, I share your pain. It will be wonderful if someone can jump in here and provide a solution, but don’t hold your breath. Not to rub salt into the wounds, but this is the defining moment when we all come to realize the true value of backing-up, working with copies, etc..

Bob

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I ran a query and deleted the records I didn’t need. The records were also deleted from my table. Is there any way to restore those records? I’m using Access 2000 and have not run compact & repair. Please help me, I’ve lost 75% of my database.

6-26-01
Thanks to all who replied. I’ve rebuilt the table & have moved on with things. Back-up daily or more is the only answer. Thanks again – abarich

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You are pretty much out of luck, sad to say. There are some database recovery services, but I don’t know if they can recover from this. Don’t do anything more to the database right now; you should just stay out of it completely. Make a copy right now also. You might try looking in classified ads of PC Magazine or Access-VB-SQL Advisor for such a service. It will not be cheap. Good luck.

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Thanks for the replies. I figured my situation was pretty sad, but you gotta ask. I do have copies, just not as recent as I would like. I’ll make more copies and work w/those just in case somebody comes up w/the magic solution.

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Yep, did the same thing myself and posted a similar plea.
Unfortunately, there is no magic fix…as you’ve learned by now.

Frequent back-ups are like paying insurance, you may hate it but it has to be there when you need it.

Look at it on the bright side: You’ve hit rock bottom with this experience.
Now, it all gets better, more efficient and easier to understand.

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As an aside for the future, there are a couple of actions you might want to take:

(1) Before running a delete query, check out the result set in a select query. If you’re expecting to delete 10 records, and your select query shows you that 10,000 meet the criteria, it’s time to take a harder look at what you’re up to.
(2) In another database expressly used for backing up historical or unwanted data, you could have a table that mirrors the structure of the one you’re deleting out of with an extra field for “Deletion Date”. Link to this table from your live database, and append into that history table the records you’re about to delete from your live table. ‘Cause I’ll wager dollars to donuts that at some point, somebody will come looking for that deleted, “unnecessary” data!!

Don’t worry; we’ve all done it. And how! After taking a deep breath, and/or several drinks, just plan on not repeating it! Good luck!

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Shane-

Love your hat! That makes a real fashion statement. Who dressed you up like that or did you do it yourself?

Bob

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You like that? Yeah, Jack Palance said I should wear it, that it had “panache”. And really, who’s going to argue with Jack Palance?

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I would be willing to bet there isn’t a person in here who hasn’t done this very thing…..and like the last post…all u can do is have a few drinks.

However, I found a way to avoid this disaster and thought I would pass it on.

A small download, Scheduler, I found FREE somewhere (don’t remember where) seems to be the BEST lil ol thing u can get. It will schedule just about any task u want it to…in this case exporting the tables to another DB.

With a little bit of coding, I can export these tables to another DB called BackUpTables.

At the end of each day the Scheduler runs the code without me ever touching a key and then I have a daily backup of my tables.

If this is something you are interested in, I would be happy to email the Scheduler Program to u (zip file) and also provide u with the code that does the process for you.

At any rate, I thought I would share that and wish u luck.

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Roberta,

Are you going to tell us where to get this miraculous program, or are we on our own?

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Bob,

After all the secrets you’ve shared with all your loyal followers (myself included), I will share mine…lol

http://www.mvps.org/access/modules/mdl0042.htm…… however, I don’t think it is much of a secret..after all I found this link on the EK BB thanks to so many that helped me there also.

Good Luck,

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I know this sounds rather obvious, but is there any chance your database was on a LAN?

Many people in my office don’t realize the LAN is backed up nightly, so when they lose something, and I advise them to approach the support dept about getting a backup they are amazed to find that they can retrieve the previous days file.

For security reason I never put any of my important files anywhere but on the LAN or zipped on a CD that I can lock up.

Just thought it was worth mentioning.

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Of course I’m on a LAN (small at home) & of course, my computer is the server, but thanks for the suggestion.

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